


All Our Yesterdays

by StarFlatinum



Series: Plot Bunny Breeding Hole [1]
Category: Bleach, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Multi, Slow Burn, Time Travel Fix-It, or die trying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 21:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30095094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarFlatinum/pseuds/StarFlatinum
Summary: Tearing Madoka from the Law of Cycles has consequences.  Obviously.Tearing Madoka from the Law of Cycles while the Law of Cycles tears Homura from Homulilly has… er, whatever consequences become after they drink a cursed cocktail of vodka, espresso, Molotov, and Bleach.(Fun fact: the term “Molotov cocktail” originates from the Winter War.Edit:No, not the Bleach one.)
Relationships: Akemi Homura/Kaname Madoka, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Series: Plot Bunny Breeding Hole [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2214462
Comments: 10
Kudos: 14





	All Our Yesterdays

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [As N Approaches Infinity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3553727) by [Corisanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corisanna/pseuds/Corisanna). 



> I have never written anything with romantic relationships, and I have strong evidence suggesting that I have no idea how they work. Also, I’m trying a few new ideas for my writing style. This should be an adventure.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time breaks, and Homura loses her name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of an experiment for me, but also something I wrote while trying to write something else, which I was trying to write while I _should_ have been writing a third thing. I’ll put out another _Stitches in Time_ chapter someday, I promise, but in the meanwhile I have a birthday present for ANAI. This thing is not a priority, but I do have a bunch of lore I’ve thought up (it explains why the TYBW doesn’t happen!) so this will eventually get continued as well.

It turned out that to save Madoka, all Homura had to do was become a Witch, rip her best friend out of the literal deity she’d become, and then reshape the universe for herself. It was so simple! Who would have guessed.

Really, Homura was as surprised as anyone, but at last ( _at last!_ ) all the resets, all the suffering and unspeakable effort, were paying off. After all this time, she wasn’t exactly going to argue with results. And results were in her grasp, in the shape of Kaname Madoka. Just one more tug, and—

The Law of Cycles grabbed onto Homura and tugged back. Two powers to turn reality on its head, equal but not quite opposite, yanked in not quite opposite directions. And that was precisely when everything went pear-shaped.

For a moment, as two friends twisted nearly beyond recognition were wrenched free of their trappings of godhood, there were no grand concepts at play, no cosmic struggle of hope and despair. There were two scared, bewildered girls scrabbling desperately for one another’s grasp as they hurtled through the shattering void that once housed all of reality. Fingertips brushed against fingertips, and for just one moment stretched to eternity, there was nothing but Madoka and Homura, at arm’s length and closer than ever before.

Eternity shattered and the moment flew past. So too did the two girls, each toward the hole the other had left, screams swallowed by the yawning gulf of incomprehensible nothing in their wake. Space crumbled and time ceased to be, until even being held no meaning.

Until not even nothing wasn’t, until even the absence of being couldn’t.

Until there came to be.

* * *

_Fshhh._

( _Ugh._ )

 ~~It~~ she ~~be~~ was. Is? That couldn’t have been. Couldn’t be? Was.

She was, and so was the… sound? Noise was. There was something making noise.

She could just _be_ , but the noise. _The noise._ Something was doing the making of noise and so she had to _do_ as well. Because the noise interrupted the not-doing.

( _Ughhh…_ )

So she tried to do. Feebly, halfheartedly ~~(what was half a heart, really?)~~ she tried to do… something. What? Did she succeed? How should she know?

Knowing. All she knew was that she was ~~(she thought that thinking she was meant she knew)~~ and that something else was, too. And that the something else was making noise.

_Fsssssh._

There were usually things to help with knowing, right? Assuming that there were enough things for “usually” to mean anything. Things, things. If those things existed, then there should be enough. That made sense.

Sense! Senses. Like hearing, to know the sound. And feeling and seeing and— and if she used senses to know about things, and then tried to do something and the things she knew changed, it meant that she’d succeeded. Right!

… or that something else succeeded at doing a thing, but that was too many variables and would be conveniently ignored. Hmm, that sure was something.

Okay, focus. Hearing. What did she hear?

_Fsssh._

That about tracked. This was going to be easy! Next, feeling.

Everything felt heavy? Pressing from all sides, and there were sides! Directions! Wasn’t that a… something. Maybe she could revisit that when she knew more things. But it was all heavy and warm and it felt like something with lots of littler things? Gritty.

Oh no, that was harder than hearing. What if this was some sort of… pattern? Did those exist? Well, there seemed to be a way to find out, so. Seeing.

Seeing did not appear to work. Could she get a refund? What was a refund? Oh no, it _was_ a pattern.

There were more senses, right? But she couldn’t think of them, so that didn’t do much for her. Moving on— oh! Moving! Good idea.

She had some idea of what moving felt like, but when she tried to do it, it felt… not like it should, somehow. Wrong. Not just because of the clinging, sucking heavy that opposed the movement as she tried to… rise? sit up? but in a way that said her dimensions were supposed to be something they weren’t. Wrong shape.

She reached a place where warm and heavy became cool and light, and she saw. Exactly _what_ she saw meant nothing to her for a time ~~(though the idea of time took a while to filter into her thoughts, so how much of a time was a complete mystery)~~. Eventually bits and pieces of ideas fell into place, and she found herself.

She found herself in a sea of sand.

White sand and black sky met in the distance, a featureless horizon all the way around. It seemed odd how much larger the sky was than the sand, though. It appeared to be because she was standing on a hill that sloped away in all directions.

Well, all directions but up.

The sand was warm and coarse beneath her, the air cool and smooth all about. Except right above her head, where there was a bit more warm coarseness that dribbled off her shoulders and down to the ground far below. So the sand did slope up after all.

_Fsssssh…_

It trickled down from a thin crescent that glowed in the sky. It fell and covered the hill, shifting and settling oh so gradually, rising around her with time. Probably a lot of time if that meant anything at all, while she lost herself staring into the slice of light and its stream of falling sand, because eventually the sand covered her vision once more. It struck her as a lot of sand, and since only a little sand came at a time, it must have been quite a lot of time as well.

She didn’t do anything else for a while longer. She just _was_ , beneath the sand ( _at the bottom of an hourglass_ , some part of her suggested). Without the visible buildup, though, the idea of time began to slip away again. In its place was…

Was…?

There was something she was meant to be doing. Something critically important, something long forgotten. Some _thing_ , or some _one_?

What had she forgotten? Or whom? Was there someone else? As time and pressure and heat crushed the sand around her into stone, time and frustration pressed down on her frail grasp of herself. What? Who? _Who?_

Who was she?

Flashes of memory from beyond time streaked across her mind, too lightning-quick for her to examine, much less understand. Buried in darkness, she reached frantically for whatever scraps of meaning these half-recollections might yield, but they slipped through her fingers like sand. Over and over, she caught sights and sounds without context, hopelessly tantalising and endlessly confusing, worse than useless. A blur of colours (pink and red and blue and yellow, overwhelming in a world of black and white and more black), a bang and ping and shattered pieces, broken and scattered like these confounding memories.

She lashed out and _roared_. Sand and sandstone scattered.

After aeons of futile musings, she stood in a flat white world under a black sky. Spires of sedimentary rocks rose in the far distance, jagged from the force of her rage. Around her, the rocks had returned to sand, and the sand to dust in the wind. And as the wind faded, the trickle of sand from the sky returned to grace her head with its persistent presence.

And a trickle of marginally more complete memories came with it.

Years, seemingly endless, drops in the bucket. Grains of sand tumbling through glass and clockwork. Guns, roses, projectiles shining with hope, tearing through labyrinths of madness and despair. An earnest smile below kind eyes shining in brown-pink-gold, an open hand adorned with a pink teardrop set in gold. A voice.

 _“It means to flare up passionately!”_ The voice was important, talking about something that must still be important even though the words were spoken in another forever. She strained her ears, though the voice sounded only within her mind. _“… live up to…”_

And it was gone.

But not forgotten. She catalogued what she knew: an important person, light and labyrinths, hope.

And the outline of a name. Not the important person’s, unfortunately not, but it would do for now. To flare up passionately.

She eyed the desert plain her own hands had created and stepped out from beneath the stream. A little mound of sand began to build where she’d been standing, where it would become a great mountain someday if left alone. She regarded her bleak domain— her _labyrinth_. If she were to have a name, it needed one too, even if it was just a desolate wasteland that reflected the empty space at the heart of her being.

Aarde Apachionada looked upon Hueco Mundo and, despite everything, saw that it was good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Building on Kubo’s naming schemes is such great fun because I get to deliberately butcher so many languages in the general direction of unpronounceability.
> 
> Also. I typed the word “thing” so many times that my fingers just automatically type it repeatedly if I leave them on the keyboard and zone out for long enough.


End file.
